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Subject:
From:
Samuel Mize <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Samuel Mize <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 17 Dec 1998 10:01:56 -0600
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Jerry van Dijk wrote:
> > Safety-critical may be optional, but I have no interest in attracting
> > Ada advocates who are not interested in high-integrity.  It is quite
> > possible to write lousy software in Ada, and the reputation of Ada is
> > best preserved by not attracting those who want to go in that direction.
>
> Are you _really_ saying that people like me should resign from this list
> and stop using Ada and leave you high and mighty people who do the
> really important work alone ?

I can't speak for Larry, but I can tell you what *I* think.

I think he overstated a very valid point.

One normally thinks of high-integrity systems as being things like
medical systems, flight controls, banking systems -- things that
absolutely HAVE to work right all the time.

Ada's good qualities qualify it for far more than this limited arena.
We want people from all project domains.

Now in non-high-integrity project domains, there are people who are
concerned about the integrity of their software -- that is to say, its
reliability, correctness and robustness.

There are also people who care less about these issues.

Some developers take a fast-fast-fast development road: slap something
together, debug it into running, test out the most obvious bugs and
promise that the others will magically disappear for the next version.

That isn't the kind of developer, or development approach, that Ada is
really suited for.

It's also a low-quality, quick-buck, unprofessional approach that I
personally despise.  However, it does have some market success, so
we're going to keep seeing it.

I think it's these kind of developers that Larry doesn't feel will add
much to a discussion of promoting or improving Ada.

I think we DO want to concentrate on the people who care about
building good-quality, well-designed systems, because frankly C is
better for a spray-n-pray development style.

So, we DO want people like you, Jerry -- I'm assuming that you DO care
about the quality of your work.  Whether you build satellite control
systems, or something where bad quality, bugs and failures are
allowable (like, say, PC operating systems...)

Best,
Sam Mize

--
Samuel Mize -- [log in to unmask] (home email) -- Team Ada
Fight Spam: see http://www.cauce.org/ \\\ Smert Spamonam

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